So, many of you have already seen the news online, in blogs, or on twitter, but I wanted to make sure our forums got a little love, too. The Video and Audio group at Adobe have been granted permission to reveal what's coming in the next release, as we prepare to show and share these features at the upcoming NAB (National Assoc. of Broadcasters) exhibition in Las Vegas, NV.

I've written an overview on the Audition blog, and I'll be happy to extend the discussion here as well. Briefly, here's a quick glance at what we've been working on:

Sound Remover

Our research team has been exploring a recent technology called Source Separation, and our first implementation offers an improved restoration and sound removal tool. Whereas our Noise Reduction tool is excellent at cleaning up static background noise, and the Adaptive Noise Reduction excels at identifying and removing changing background sounds, the Sound Remover excels at plucking out foreground sounds while minimizing harm to overlapping content.

Preview Editor

You may have noticed the split-screen view in the above screenshot. Audition's Waveform editor now supports a dual-view that can be used for many purposes. Originally designed to provide a visual confirmation for effects which change the duration or timing of a file (including the Pitch Bender effect, which will be discussed below) we found it provides excellent visual feedback for almost all effect operations, allowing you to see and hear your changes before you commit. In addition, it can be used to edit or compare arbitrary regions of a single file, or the lower view can always zoom to a selection so you can better maintain your place in the upper view. Very powerful, though I suspect everyone may find their own way to use it.

64-bit Performance

Audition is now a fully 64-bit application on both OS X and Windows providing improved memory handling, performance, and support for the latest generation of OS, hardware, and plug-ins. The use of jBridge, a 32-64 bit bridge for VST effects, enables you to continue using your favorite legacy effects while taking advantage of new technology and plug-ins.

Editable Favorites / Favorites Panel

Access your recorded favorites from a dockable or floating panel now, and modify them as needed.

New and updated Sound Design effects and tools

Among the returning and updated effects are Pitch Bender, Scientific Filter, Pitch Shifter (real-time, automatable pitch correction and adjustment) and the Stereo Expander. Generate Noise is back with additional noise profiles, and both Noise and Tones can now be generated directly in Multitrack view.

Enhanced Spectral Frequency Selections

Multiple spectral selections can now be made with the Lasso and Paintbrush tools, adding to or removing from the selection mask, and enabling complex, detailed selections.

Multitrack Enhancements

Look for a lot of visual and navigation improvements, most based directly on user requests. Track Colors with Smart Clip Colors make it easy to visually group and identify your content or quickly assess where you are in the Mixer from across the room. Quickly silence umms, ahhs, or offensive words without splitting clips or manually creating and adjusting keyframes. When dragging multiple clips into a session, easily switch between placing the clips consecutively on a single track, or stacked on multiple tracks, and see more intelligent use of existing, empty tracks. Also, the full clip duration and content is displayed when dragging into a session, and crossfades are automatically created when dropped on top of another clip. Easily select all clips on a track with a double-click, or select all clips forward or backward from the playhead. New commands for jumping between markers while ignoring other elements, adjusting the view without moving the playhead or selections, and quick keyboard overrides to zoom into the playhead or the cursor at your command.

Frequency Band Splitter

This useful tool, popular among remixers, was always hidden within Multitrack in older versions of Audition, and was rather confusing for many users. We've redesigned this tool to be more intuitive and visual. Easily split a file into new files by frequency range.

All sorts of other features!

Export directly to your SoundCloud account, match device sample rate to your documents, set default names for new markers, see detailed data about the audio under your cursor, improved sync and silence recognition with the Automatic Speech Alignment tool. WMA and WASAPI driver support on Windows. iTunes metadata support. AAC and the complete Apple AudioToolbox support on Mac OS X.

The hard sell!

Our marketing and sales teams would be disappointed if I didn't include a brief sales pitch at the end. Fortunately, it's a great deal and a big discount if you're someone who likes saving a bit of money.

The release date has not been announced, but there is a great way to get yourself to the front of the line. If you join Adobe Creative Cloud now, you will immediately receive the entire stable of currently shipping Adobe CS6 applications AND you will automatically receive the new versions of Audition and all your other favorite Adobe applications as soon as they are available. From April 4 through 19, 2013, we’re offering our NAB Show Special giving you 40% off Creative Cloud for your first year – that’s only $29.99/month It’s an amazing way to keep your production costs really low and your tools up-to-date all the time.

Learn MoreDiscover more about what’s coming to the next versions of the Adobe pro video tools at: adobe.com/go/nab_reveal.

Not yet, but we've prioritized this support pretty highly for the future. I think Audition could probably support the Mercury Transmit engine from Premiere for display output without too much tinkering. It's pretty important, in my opinion.

I should probably comment on the 64-bit change and what this means for legacy VST effects. Native 32-bit VST and AudioUnit effects are not directly supported with this release, however they work well when wrapped within bit-bridge tools.

We've implemented native API support for jBridge on Windows, which allows you to specify the location of your 32-bit VST effects and have them scanned and appear in your Effects list. On Mac the API support was still in beta during development, so we don't offer the same native functionality for jBridge. However, you can use jBridge to wrap your VST effects (in effect, creating 64-bit VST effects that contain the 32-bit effect within) and access them from Audition as normal.

For many commercial plug-ins, manufacturers are releasing 64-bit updates to their users and we recommend you use the native release if possible.

I'll be writing a blog post, and cc'ing to the forum, going into a bit more depth soon. If you're visiting NAB this week, stop on by the Audition booth and I'll be happy to talk about it more.

Have you noticed an improvement on the track pre-render times? I think one of th big hang ups might be how it handles video? It seems that large projects make Audition chug a little. Granted I'm not on a brand new system (Intel Q6600 with 8GB of ram and a ProFire 610) but we are doing 99% of our post sound for our feature(~85mins) in Audition and we have well over 200 tracks and mixing in 5.1 with JBL LSR2300 seires.

It sometimes seems to get choked up and needs to be restarted.

Regardless it seems to do very well...oh weird question but has the bug with having reverb on an empty track been fixed?

One of the things that's confused me about Audition CS6 and pre-rendering, in comparison to Audition 3.0......on XP .

Audition 3.0 - You lock a track, it saves the locked track as a .wav in some other folder. From that point forward, I assume it simply reads the newly created .wav file. This kept processor usage at a minimum since it didn't have to calculate the fx. And it didn't increase memory consumption, why should it?

Audition CS6 - You pre-render the track, it saves the pre-rendered track as a .wav. I would assume it reads from this newly created .wav, however memory consumption is considerably higher with the pre-rendered track than without. Surely it's not pre-rendering, saving the pre-rendered track, and then reading from memory instead of the saved file. I'm assuming the extra memory consumption is just left over from non-garbage collected pre-rendering process?

And then in addition, closing the session, results in your pre-rendered / saved tracks being automatically deleted, meaning that Audition has to re-pre-render the tracks the next time Audition is opened, resulting in significant increased memory consumption.

Now certainly I understand why Audition chose to re-pre-render the tracks again. What if the underlying file (non rendered) was changed since the last time the session was opened. Unless you're also keeping up with file save timestamps this is the safest method, but cleanup your memory garbage after you've pre-rendered please.

Just got one of my favorite bugs some sort of memory fail and I get a blue screen of death it dumps the memory and the computer reboots. At random, I only get this with audition...premiere running dpx 85 minutes long no issues but audition just dies...again 200+ tracks and 5.1 but still? Maybe a 32 bit problem.

I too have Windows 7, 32 bit and yes, to use the new version a 64 bit OS will be needed, either with a new computer or by changing the OS of your current one.

I'm currently in "hot" debate with myself as to whether to put a 64 bit OS on my laptop or create a dual-boot system on my desktop. There are sufficient features in the new AA (BTW is it AA CS7, or, as I believe I read somewhere, AA CS6.5?) to make upgrading highly desirable for me.

Oh more bugs. Sometimes after you solo a track when you un solo it the track will disapear or random tracks in a mix will just not play back then you stop and start again they come back or sometimes you have to mute a track and un mute it or solo and un solo to get the track to come back. Is that issue fixed. It can happen at random.

Computer processing power very rarely comes into issues like that - but the ability of your HD to stream enough tracks does. You have to bear in mind that if you use an alarming number of tracks at once, they all have to be streamed in real time from the drive. If you are going to use loads of processing on them as well, then perhaps processor performance might come into it, as might the amount of RAM you are able to use - but yes, these are all functions of the ability of your computer to cope, and not Audition. If the software was 'bugged' from that point of view, it would be discovered early on in the testing cycle. But it remains true that if you are going to get the best out of the machinery you've got, you have to optimise its performance.

I checked on exactly what we are allowed to refer to it as, and for the time being it's fine to refer to it (helpfully) as 'Audition Next'...

I was lucky enough to see a demo of "Audition Next" and then have a bit of a play with it and I can confirm even the Audition people were calling it "Audition Next". Well, that's when they didn't slip up and call it "the next version".

FYI, in the time I had to try it, I was VERY impressed. I do a lot of sound design work and those new tools are the bee's knees (or is it the cat's whiskers?). Anyway, the impatience I mentioned above is now even worse.

My other impression is that Audition Next (you know, that would be a good name for the actual product!) is blazingly fast compared to CS6--and CS6 isn't exactly slow on my DAW. I don't know if this is a product of changes to the software or the move to 64 bit or a mix of both but the change is noticeable. I'm very happy that, when tech issues forced me to buy a new computer about six months ago, I got a 64 bit OS as the same time.

Anyhow, I'm one of those who didn't go for CS5.5 when it came out--but "Audition Next" has already joined my "want it!" list.

My other impression is that Audition Next (you know, that would be a good name for the actual product!) is blazingly fast compared to CS6--and CS6 isn't exactly slow on my DAW. I don't know if this is a product of changes to the software or the move to 64 bit or a mix of both but the change is noticeable. I'm very happy that, when tech issues forced me to buy a new computer about six months ago, I got a 64 bit OS as the same time.

Well, having got CS6 and Audition Next side by side on the same 64-bit DAW I can't really say that for what I've been using them for, there's a huge amount of difference, although having a 64-bit app on a 64-bit system is definitely smoother than emulating the 32-bit one. But to be fair, it's hard to tell here, and the reasons for this are several-fold; For a start, it's a pretty fast system anyway (i7-based), but rather more significantly all the HDs in it are SSDs and this makes a huge difference to the overall performance of everything. So from hitting the start button, you have a fully working (including all that pratting about it does after displaying the desktop) W7-64 in about 50 seconds. And that includes booting external stuff like my sound device. And all the temp files have a drive of their own.

And as a consequence, both CS6 and Audition Next don't hang about, either of them.

The point is that if you are going to contemplate a new 64-bit platform, then it's worth considering everything about it, because it's not just the processing power that makes a difference. Because Audition in any form now is a streaming system as far as Multitrack performance is concerned, what you do about HDs is significant.

Other than that, there are a lot of little things that are nicer about the new version. Durin's only featured the main highlights above, but there's a list of other stuff that's been enhanced, and that's about an A4 sheet-full. Whatever it's going to be called, it's a significant upgrade on the present version.

Any chance you can zoom in and directly click on an individual sample and drag/move it with the new version of AA? I missed that individual sample editing from CoolEdit, AA 1.5 and 3.0 when I tried the demo of CS6, and it's one of the main things stopping me from purchasing it. I've submitted feature requests for this and other things on the website, but no replies.

P.S. The other requirement for me would be an "Export to .wav with .cue file" option, as I do a lot of DDP authoring, and this is required by the DDP software in order to keep all crossfades and track markers etc. in place in the final DDP for pressing plants and distribution.

Any chance you can zoom in and directly click on an individual sample and drag/move it with the new version of AA? I

Strictly speaking, we're only allowed to talk about features of the new release, so I can't talk about that one - if you see what I mean... but you can highlight an individual sample and move it up and down using the on-screen HUD. As far as I'm concerned sample drawing is of very limited value; YMMV.

As for your query about whether Audition has a fully-featured DDP option - well not in the sense that you mean, I expect. IOW it doesn't create a separate DDP image. But, as far as audio CDs are concerned you can achieve pretty much anything required from them, including CD-text, gap timing changes, etc. but you won't get what I'd call a sensible display of all the metadata. You have to bear in mind that in Audition, the CD option is really only there to provide quick client copies, rather than be a complete solution as such - although I've sent CDs directly from it for glass mastering and had no complaints from the plant at all, so it can't be that bad! I can understand why you'd want a DDP image (and indeed the facility would be rather desirable), but I can't see that one making it any time soon, as it seems to be somewhat beyond the software's present remit.

Didn't know about the HUD for moving individual samples, so that's great to know! Will download demo again and take a closer look... Seem to remember that the "Auto Heal" function would also do something similar.

Re: DDP, I don't want AA to have DDP export/functionality, as I aleady have that with DDP Creator Pro, to a very high standard. But what I do need from AA is the ability to export a CD project as a .wav plus .cue file, which would keep all timing, track marker, and crossfades in place.

Audition can certainly retain all the timing and track markers intact when exporting as a .wav. And you can add CD text data for the CD or track titles as well as IRSC metadata. If you need a separate .cue file then the third party CueList Tool can extract the metadata from the Audition .wav and save it as a cue list file.